Dearest Darling Friends,

The CEO of Bokhre Foundry, Anshul Bokhre, asked me this during an executive review.

The company had smart people.
Clear reporting structures.
Strong managers.

And yet, somehow, difficult decisions kept flowing upward.

At first, leadership blamed agency gap.
“People need to take more ownership” they said.
That explanation sounded reasonable.

But after spending time inside the organization, something else became visible.

Every time teams made independent decisions that differed slightly from leadership preferences… corrections arrived quickly.

Not harshly.
Not dramatically.
In hushed instructions.
Behind the managers back.

Soon employees learned that real expectations lies in alignment, not experimentation.

One manager told me quietly after a meeting:
“We are allowed to decide… as long as we decide the way leadership would have.”

That sentence changed the entire conversation. Why?

Because ownership cannot grow where decision making remains as a ‘lip service’.

And organizations learn this remarkably fast.

People adapt themselves around invisible consequences:

What gets praised?
What gets reworked?
What gets questioned?

Very soon, ‘initiative’ becomes performative rather than genuine.

I have lived this dichotomy myself too.

Earlier in my leadership journey, I believed I was maintaining quality every time I corrected a managers decision behind his back.
I was actually weakening trust in independent thinking without realizing it.

The difficult truth is this:

Leaders cannot demand ownership while punishing variance.
These two realities cannot coexist.

Mature leadership is not creating clones.

Inside your business, are people truly trusted to think independently… or mainly trusted to execute predictably?
The answer lies in whether people boldly take decisions or do they take decisions like a clone.

With love, prayers and best wishes,